Spring semester: day eighty
Finals week: day two
On Saturday, I boxed up every dish and plate in the cabinets, as well as all cooking utensils (spatulas, ladles and the like), and boxed up all of the shelf-stable food in the cupboard that I won't eat between now and next weekend. I have five or six bowls left, all of the silverware (which I'll use a fair amount of between now and then), two glasses, and three coffee mugs left in the cupboards. They look bare. Everything else has been boxed away and readied for moving.
I also cleaned the sink and cabinets in the bathroom and scrubbed them down hardcore. I used the "bag and vinegar" trick on the showerhead so that it would dissolve any mineral deposits in it. I used two different bleach-containing cleaners to spray down the shower with, and have been waiting for it to all foam up and drain so that I can, y'know, actually shower and rinse it off the walls as well. Cleaning that shower/bathroom is a nightmare. It's not well-ventilated at all; there's only one fan in it, and it's up near the ceiling -- to turn it on, you have to stand on the tub/toilet and plug it in manually. As a result, I can only be in the bathroom for a few minutes at a time before the bleach fumes start burning my eyes and nostrils, and I have to go in and out if I want to get anything done and be able to breathe. Between now and the move, I'll spray it down with vinegar and water, but that's about all the extra cleaning it'll get after today. I have enough shit to clean in the rest of the house. I have to sponge-mop the bathroom floor and scrub down the toilet, too -- something that I'll probably wait to do until the day before the move, more than likely, as I don't want to waste time re-cleaning it again and again because of normal bathroom use. The sink and mirrors I can keep relatively clean.
Here's the other problem, though -- when the bathroom is full of bleach fumes, I can't use it. There's the second bathroom downstairs, yes, but it's had bleach in the toilet bowl for the past three weeks so that I can easily clean it (that toilet's never been cleaned since I've lived here, because it's so rarely used -- as a result, it has a ton of calcium deposits/hard water stains in it from just basically sitting there). Of course, I have to clean out the downstairs bathroom as well, and that will be one of the last things done before the move also (because that's where the cats' food/litter is, and the room we'll have to lock them up in once we start the moving in and out of the house).
Welcome to my life, folks.
The kitchen's pots and pans will be boxed up this afternoon, as well as most of the silverware I won't use between now and the move. There are tons of various little tasks I have to take care of as well, such as vacuuming and emptying the shredder, shredding all of the nonessential stuff I've collected over the years, etc. Tomorrow's also the only trash day between now and the moving day itself, so I need to get everything out that I can. All of this translates to a good chunk of work for me for the rest of the day and into the night -- but it's work that has to be done whether I want it to be done or not.
The past two days have been interesting, that's for sure.
I spent a rather large amount of time in the kitchen on Saturday night, as mentioned before, boxing things up. As I sealed the box full of dishes, I used the very last of the duct tape I had for any of my boxes. This meant (obviously) that I couldn't box anything else up whether I wanted to or not. I looked at the clock. It was 8:30 or so.
As you may know, and as I mentioned here before, some nasty severe storms were predicted for the weekend. We've actually had a good chance of them every day for the past week or so, really, but on Saturday night they were beginning to fire up everywhere. I also mentioned before that I had to go to Walmart at some point (I'd originally planned it for after the donut meet-up on Friday, but decided to just come home and go to bed), so I was in a conundrum -- either be done for the night (which wouldn't have been a great idea), or go out right then before the storms made their way up here, as my car was already in the driveway and not the garage.
So, of course, I left for Walmart. Apparently, on the night before Mother's Day, when storms were coming, everyone else in town had the same idea. As I drove the three miles or so to get there, I watched lightning light up huge cumulonimbus clouds on what appeared to be all sides of me. I burned into the parking lot, got out, ran inside the store, and attempted to hustle like mad through my shopping -- no small task considering that for some reason, on a Saturday night after 9PM, the store was crazy busy.
I was getting everything I needed and was on the way to the checkout when I ran into a former student of mine -- a particularly "talk your ear off" former student, at that. She also used to work there, but doesn't anymore. There was no getting in a hurry anyway; six or seven registers were open and each one had a good five or six people in line, the lines stretching back into the womens' clothing section. I overheard one of the Walmart workers saying that they'd lost four or five cashiers in the past week -- the people had just had enough and quit.
That explains a lot, I thought. I can only check out through the "express" lane, aisle 15, anyhow -- it's the only register through which one can get cigarettes. Throughout the entire waiting-in-line and checkout process (which was a longer wait than the time it took me to actually do all of my shopping), I was also having my ear talked off by said student.
Finally, I checked out and got out of there, and we went our separate ways. The lightning was brighter and the thunder was audible now, and I got splashed by a few big, wet drops of rain as I was basically throwing everything into the car. I've lived in Kansas a long time; I know that when the thunder/lightning is that close, it's mere minutes at best before the sky opens up hell on you. As I'd seen photos of golf-ball-sized hail earlier in the day and knew that was coming my way, I wanted to get the Monte Carlo home and into the garage before said hail started falling, as I already have a chip in my windshield -- a few direct hits of large hail in the vicinity of that chip, and I'll no longer have auto glass in my car.
I careened into my driveway and threw open the garage door, and pulled the car into the safety of the underground, protected garage. As I put the door back down and began moving stuff into the house, the thunder rattled the windows.
And nothing happened.
No, seriously.
I watched the radar; it all went just north and west of me, and east and north of me -- splitting into two big cells that dissipated the further they went north and east. Nothing. Not a drop of rain on me aside from the few drops I'd been hit with in the Walmart parking lot. While the lightning was pretty, it very quickly disappeared. And it remained hot, muggy, and nasty, with no relief. WTF, Kansas.
I finished my packing and cleaning for the night, made some food, and went to bed. Because it had been so muggy and hot and the rain didn't come, the house felt like a greenhouse, even downstairs. It was the uncomfortable kind of mugginess that you can get no relief from no matter what you do -- turning on the fan (even on its lowest setting) was too uncomfortable/chilly, and leaving it off meant everything remained stifling. I had a hard time falling asleep, as you could probably guess.
Yesterday morning I awoke in a daze, sweaty and surrounded by cats. I had nowhere to be, no, but I had a lot to do. Once I was sufficiently awake, I finished cleaning the bathroom -- or at least the shower and the like -- which I had to do while shirtless and in my underwear due to the copious amounts of bleach in use. This led to a sweaty, shirtless Mother's Day family lunch with Daisy and her parents, where I was "seated" at the table with them via Skype and Daisy's laptop.
Look, I'm one of those people who cares not who sees him naked (or partially naked, what-have-you, especially around family), but Skype only shows me from the chest up. And I was sweaty and shirtless at the dinner table with Daisy and her parents, which was (at the very least) slightly inappropriate and embarrassing, even via computer. Some guys look good when sweaty and topless. I am not one of those guys. When I'm sweaty and topless I look like a corpse dragged out of the river. I'm sure they didn't care, but still. I am the guy who's marrying their daughter in a few weeks.
After our Mother's Day lunch was over, I got back to work. The kitchen is now completely packed up with the exception of a few odds and ends and the smaller appliances (toaster, popcorn popper, microwave, dehydrator). I cleaned out the fridge and freezer, getting rid of everything I wouldn't need or take with me, and I refilled the filtered water bottles for the last time. In the coming days I will pack what's left and what's coming with me, and will clean everything else. As for the "large item pickup" for the trash next week, I can schedule that online but can't do it before tomorrow, as they set it up for your next trash pickup day and don't give you the option to schedule it in advance for a certain date. If I would've scheduled it this weekend, they would've tried to do it today...before I can move everything I need to throw out down to the road.
Of course, my actual cleanup and finishing-of-packing days are cut down to but three days this week -- today, Thursday, and Friday (with a bit on Saturday, probably), as tomorrow and Wednesday I'll have to be on campus for final exams, grading, and moving everything out of my office. This is mostly fine, as there's a lot of stuff I can't pack until later in the week anyhow (like most of the stuff here in my Man Cave -- my computer, my desk stuff, coffee pot, furniture, etc).
The schedule for the move is, indeed, a tight one:
This week:
- Today: pack and clean some more various stuff
- Tomorrow: 011 final exam tomorrow night, getting on campus in the afternoon
- Wednesday: returning to campus to grade, enter grades, drop off keys, collect my belongings
- Thursday: see today.
- Friday: cleaning bathroom floors, wiping down walls and windows where I can
- Saturday: sleeping in as long as possible, moving larger furniture out of rooms and into easily-accessible places for truck loading, filling the car with gas and driving it to Omaha that night to drop it off (that'll be fun)
- Sunday: getting up with Daisy, driving back down here in her car, readying everything else we can to be easily moved into the truck, cleaning what we can before the heavy lifting
- Monday: Hardcore work day #1 -- picking up the U-Haul in the morning ASAP, loading everything we can into it until we can no longer physically move, putting the large items out for large item trash pickup, and probably sleeping on the floor that night
- Tuesday: Hardcore work day #2 -- putting everything else in the truck that needs to be in there early in the morning and sealing it up, steam-cleaning carpets and cleaning the rest of the house a "passable" amount, calling landlord to do final walkthrough and hand-over of keys, and leaving Kansas for good with the cats in tow
- Wednesday: Hardcore work day #3 -- unloading the truck and moving everything into the new apartment piece by piece, box by box, morning until night, until it's all done and in there. SLEEP.
- Thursday: filling the truck with gas and dropping it off, move complete. Unpack some stuff with whatever energy we have left. SLEEP.
- Friday: SLEEP. Daisy works that night. Unpack whatever I can or want while she works.
- Saturday: Internet gets turned on in new place between 1-3 PM.
As you can see, yes, it's a tight schedule with a lot of stuff to be done and a slow winding-down afterwards. And again, I look around me and see how much I have left to do...but I also see what has been done already because I've been busting my ass for the past several weeks on my days off. I do have a to-do list of little things that I can't forget to do between now and the move, and I'm slowly working my way through them, so that's a plus.
Anyway.
What happened after the Mother's Day lunch yesterday? Well, that's another adventure in itself...
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